Three Forms of Enterprise CMS Intelligence
"The concept of Intelligent Content Management is the idea of deriving more value from existing Content Management systems."
1. Content Analytics
The first part of the story is Content Analytics. The proposition behind Content Analytics is to mine the content already resident in the repository and identify trends and exceptions.
The search engines that are being embedded are offering improved algorithms and allowing the display of results in ways that go beyond the simple list. Faceted search capabilities are allowing users to look at their results from different angles, providing instant filtering on several dimensions of your content.
2. Business Intelligence Tools
The second effort at enhancing the value of existing information is focused on the application of Business Intelligence tools to better visualize what is happening at any given moment. This goes beyond just placing all of the metadata into a data warehouse for analysis — it involves constant monitoring of key components within the repositories themselves. The value, potential, and interest for this capability was evident in the response to the Swedish Military system.
... As always, the devil/implementation is in the details. IBM and Oracle already own BI tools, so they can also have the potential to provide a one-stop-shop for this functionality.
The blending of all that metadata, audit logs, and Content Analytics should offer people a new way of looking at their content. Context is the key here, and this is just the beginning.
3. Content Management Interoperability (CMIS)
Most content is not just content. Starting with documents which contain “unstructured” information, you then add metadata and presentation, creating content. When you provide that content in context, it becomes information.
This is where integration and federation comes into play. With CMIS, the ability to pull content into other applications is much easier, but the information also needs to flow in reverse. The most successful systems that I have seen have information from all systems come into a single, purpose-built dashboard.
The ability to talk to other systems is going to become more important to the Content Management vendors. Historically, they have worked hard to integrate with systems, but integration only works within an organization. The necessary context for content is becoming more likely to reside outside of the control of IT, where those old integration efforts fail.
Being able to interact with the same piece of content from within both SalesForce and SharePoint, while sharing it with external partners, is becoming the common scenario and not the exception.
Moving into the Future
There are a lot of things that will make this all easier, and those are hurdles that the Enterprise CMS vendors must master in order to bring their vision of Intelligent Content to fruition.
The key will be to create an approach that unifies the traditional business intelligence field with the next generation of content management systems. Once that happens, we won’t need Intelligent Content Management because we’ll have true Information Management."
